Voyager Torture: Learning Curve (Season 1, Episode 16)

Voyager Torture features Vincent reviewing an episode of Star Trek Voyager that he’s seen for the first time and Chris Piers creating a drawing based on that episode based solely on Vincent’s review and never having seen the show.

It’s the last episode of the first season of Star Trek: Voyager! That means we’re going out on a big bang, right? Nope, but it’s not all bad! But it starts out bad. We get another time filler of Janeway’s holo novel. Boy, this better be going somewhere. Luckily it doesn’t take all that long and then we’re actually making some plot progression.

The Voyager uses these newfangled bio-neural gel packs that are failing. And some of the crew aren’t getting along. Yep, they brought back the Maquis story line for this episode. They round up the four worst ones and decide to train them the Starfleet way. Tuvok is a former Starfleet Academy teacher, so it’s his job to shape these losers up. We got the crabby chick, the douchey white guy, a troubled Bajoran teen, and blue fatty alien. And they’re all jerks.

Tuvok tries to train them, but they quit. Then when they brag up quitting to Chakotay he bitch slaps the douchey white guy. That was awesome. So they get back to training and all this stuff is pretty good. It’s about on the level of a slightly less than average Next Generation episode, but that’s amazing for Voyager. And best of all no Neelix!

But because the writers of Voyager were contractually obligated to ruin the series by putting Neelix in every episode, he shows up. Sigh.

Well the problem with the failing bio-neural gel packs was getting worse this whole time and it’s traced back to… cheese that Neelix was making. It sounds more stupid than it is, because it kind of works for the episode… but it’s still pretty damned stupid.

The episode ends with them figuring out how to stop the remaining packs from failing and killing them all, while Tuvok and his team get through a life threatening situation together. Decent stuff.

Least Annoying Characters:

The Doctor, Tuvok, Chakotay

Most Torturous Moment:

Tie between the opener and Neelix cheese, which makes me think of dick cheese.